On the Run with Mary - Ebook

Shining moments of tender beauty punctuate this story of a youth on the run after escaping from an elite English boarding school. At London’s Euston Station, the narrator meets a talking dachshund named Mary and together they’re off on escapades through posh Mayfair streets and jaunts in a Rolls-Royce. But the youth soon realizes that the seemingly sweet dog is a handful; an alcoholic, nymphomaniac, drug-addicted mess who can’t stay out of pubs or off the dance floor. In a world of abusive headmasters and other predators, the erotically omnivorous youth discovers that true friends are never needed more than on the mean streets of 1960s London, as he tries to save his beloved Mary from herself.On the Run with Mary mirrors the horrors and the joys of the terrible 20th century. Jonathan Barrow’s original drawings accompany the text.

“The primitive, understated style amid such horrors has a nice comic effect, and it might be argued that Barrow only exaggerates the usual catalog of man’s inhumanity … Barrow suggests a writer who might in time have joined the ranks of William Burroughs, William Kotzwinkle, or John Kennedy Toole.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Topping them all … an absolutely outrageous novel … about the glorious curiosities of the United Kingdom.”

—The Rumpus

“Finally, fresh absurdism for Anglophiles! … On the Run with Mary is sardonic, obscene and utterly unsentimental. Limericks by Joy Division, Lewis Carroll talking in his sleep, and unlike much of the avant-garde, it’s funny. You won’t laugh until, but rather because, it hurts.”

—Daniel Genis, author of The Last Beat

“A masterpiece by a young genius, fated to die shortly after he had completed it.”

—A.N. Wilson, author of Victoria: A Life; Tolstoy: A Biography and Wise Virgin

“The headlong energy and happy perversity of On the Run with Mary makes one admire much of what Barrow did, and wonder with sorrow at what he might have done.”

—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and Home Land

“Beatrix Potter meets the Marquis de Sade: Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel a work of genius.”

—The Spectator

“Darkly comic, treading a thin line between brilliance and total barminess … a surrealist masterpiece.”

—The Guardian

“A unique masterpiece from a bizarre mind. To say it’s Lewis Carroll meets Jean Genet … would be to belittle its farcically-filthy originality.”